“... ballet pictures from the London branch of the Paris dealer Durand-Ruel, quickly followed by two more plus a picture then called Figures in a French Café. Hill was striking early: the first Degas had entered a British collection only in 1872. It also made his holdings the largest in Europe at that time. In the year of its acquisition, Hill showed Figures in ...”

“... quite getting the poetry. I remember being put off by all the ‘O, muse!’ stuff, which seemed more redolent of attic tallow than city neon. He was declared the first modernist, but he didn’t feel ‘modern’ in the way Rilke or Jarry or Apollinaire did. (Never mind other teen crushes like Charlie Parker and William Burroughs, Frank O’Hara and Andy ...”

“... in Chinatown or talk shows’. He concludes: ‘The kid with the clicker is the Boss.’ Or, more sombrely: ‘Here consciousness emptily asserts itself.’ Both Whitman and Eliot, the polar American writers of modern life, are, perhaps, faintly present in echoes under Bellow’s powerful prose. The rhetoric of multiplicity is other than American (Robert ...”

“... house with Paul’s latest confessions. As the investigation progressed, the Ingrams produced ever more elaborate accounts; they said there’d been buggery and gang rape. Julie Ingram said two of Paul’s colleagues had joined in when they came over to play poker. The colleagues claimed not to be able to remember anything of the kind. The accounts weren’t ...”

“... Henry. Above all, William wanted – for himself and others – to be well enough to fulfil a more conventional plot than one of Henry’s: to marry and to work (including ‘inner work’, or self-culture).Contemplating marriage, he became exercised about ‘right breeding’ in a post-Darwinian world: should he ignore his family tendencies to infirmity ...”

“... or signed a dictated peace, so all the sacrifices had been worthwhile. The end in Vietnam was more enigmatic. Either the world’s strongest military and economic power was defeated by a Third World country with less than a fifth of America’s population – a military miracle – or, even more shameful, the US ...”

“... who had cut his throat, but that the fathers prevented it, he then restor’d the cords, and was more tractable ever after.’ The Voyage is not, of course, Johnson’s work, but a translation of a French translation of a 17th-century manuscript by the Portuguese Jesuit Jeronimo Lobo. But the English is Johnson’s, and it has a curtness absent from his ...”

“... job apocalypse to see that work will continue to change in the direction of machines doing more and humans doing less, and often less interesting, work. These trends overlap and compound. As Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght put it in Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy,We live in a new world, remade by ...”

“... citizens. Though it sounded implausible at the time, Archer’s proposal was in line with the more baroque – perhaps pre-Cameronian – tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a ...”

“... Paul Hammond, in his introduction to the Poems, suggests that Dryden’s ‘translations are far more important, and potentially more attractive to modern readers, than the prevailing consensus would suggest’; this seems plausible, not only because of the translations’ inherent qualities but because of the resurgent ...”

“... into a few schools in Birmingham’. The so-called Trojan Horse scandal spread until it took in more than twenty schools – and that was only ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British ...”

“... political agendas. Minuscule by contemporary standards, Paris 1924 was significantly bigger and more prominent than earlier games, with more than three thousand athletes – triple the number in 1900. The media too were a significant presence: more than a thousand accredited journalists ...”

“... where the attack was expected to occur and stroll around for nearly an hour, so that they were more than a mile away from their vehicle when the SAS was finally sent in. At the inquest into the deaths, the soldiers explained the killings by saying that they had been ordered to arrest the three, but that each had made suspicious movements which had led the ...”

“... who had learned almost nothing of Scotland’s past at school. Now, though, the fashion is more reflexive. Tom Devine, currently Scotland’s leading historian, targets myth – aspects of the past which have been either flamboyantly invented or furtively dropped down the memory hole. What are these tracts of their history which the Scots have ...”

“... We shall know more about the origins of the English Civil War when we know more about English Puritans. This seems, on the face of it, an absurd proposition. From S.R. Gardiner’s confident description of the Great Rebellion as ‘the Puritan Revolution’ downwards, we have not lacked studies which linked Protestant religious attitudes to the coming of the Civil War ...”